To get an idea what a typical SLES 10 user will experience, we simply used the MySQL version which is supported by the latest SLES 10 SP1, i.e. MySQL 5.0.26. The testing configuration was identical to our 3.2GHz Opteron review.

Forgive us for this quick test, as we had only a few days to test Barcelona before the NDA. You'll see other versions of MySQL pop up in later reviews. The first results seem to indicate that AMD's newest quad-core is capable of keeping up with slightly faster quad-core Xeons, but the results are not yet conclusive.

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according to mysql site, starting with 5.0.37, the mutex contention bug and the Innodb bug has been improved by a lot, which helps 8 core systems.

I was wondering that since 5.0.45 is available on mysql's website, why isn't the latest mysql being benchmarked? 5.0.26 still has that bug, and you can see it in the benchmark where a 8 core system is slower than a 4 core which is slower than a 2 core.

Now that we are benchmarking 8-16 core systems, the newest versions of software should be used to reflect the improved multithreading. Reply

I currently have a 4 way 2.4ghz opteron as a production db server that I am considering upgrading. I'm trying to use the Anandtech benchmarks to help project how much performance gain we'll see in a new machine.

We're running Oracle but are considering moving to MySQL. So I am trying to compare the stat's in 2 Anandtech reviews to see how the new Barcelona cores compare to the Intel Woodcrest and Clovertown.

Ultimately I want to compare the Opteron 2350 vs Xeon 5345 and then the Opteron 8350 vs Xeon E7330 but I'm starting with what exists for benchmarks first so I can make sure I understand what I am reading.

I read another review and they got these scores on the slightly lowerspeed 1.9 GHz Barcelona.

Barcelona 2347 (1.9Ghz)
37.5 Gflop/s

Intel Xeon 5150(2.6Ghz)
35.3 Gflop/s

It seems your Barcelona scores are way off for some reason.
The Xeons score is more or less identical.
This seems really weird. Normally the higher score is the correct one due to some bad optimizations. The rest of the article is great though.

This article seems to be very biased.
1) they choose faster Intel processors, 2 GHz Opteron. There are 2 GHz processors available across all the processors used in this analysis.
2) No mention of what compiler was used. Intel compilers earlier had a trick, which was not documented - any code optimized for Intel processors if used on non-intel processors (uhm! AMD), would disable all optimizations. Who knows what else they are doing now. And this gentleman used Intel optimized code on AMD to test performance. Who in the right mind measuring performance would do that?
3) Intel MKL was used for BLAS. Shouldnt they use ACML for AMD code? Again, who would do that when looking for performance?
4) Memory Subsystem - knowing that the frequencies are different, why were all the results not normalized?
5) They managed to comment that Tulsa and Opteron 2000 series are half the performance of core or Barcelona and hence should not be considered in the first page. But in Linpack page, it is mentioned that Intel chips ate AMD ones for breakfast. Of course, they did - peak of Xeon 5100 series is twice that of Opteron 2000 series. You dont need LINPACK to tell you that. Gives a very biased impression.
6) LinPACK results graph could not be any more wrong. The peak performance of each CPU considered is different ... obviously their sustained performance is going to be different. The author should have at least made the effort to normalize the graph to show the real comparison.
7) Since when is Linpack "Intel friendly"

The author says they didnt have time to optimize code for AMD Opteron ... why would you do a performance study in the first place if you didnt have the methodology right.

I didnt even read beyind LinPACK .. I would be careful reading articles from this author next time and maybe the whole site ... Its sad to see such an immature article. Whats worse is majority of people would just see the "fact" Intel is still faster than AMD.

Over all, a very immature article with false information cleverly hidden behind numbers. or could it be that this article was intended to be biased .... who knows. Reply

quote:Why is that the "real comparison"? If Intel has a clockspeed advantage, nobody is going to downclock their CPUs to be fair to AMD.

That is true in the desktop scene but I am sure you know that servers is about performance/price and performance/w. Prices will declinge and we don't know what the price is tomorrow. It is ok to compare against a similarly priced cpu but a comparison against a
same frequency cpu is very interesting too.

Your LINPACK score just seems obscure. Somewhat Intel friendly compiler? LOL. If the compiler is so great why is the gcc score I read on another review 30% higher with the Barcelona(with a 1.9 GHz CPU)? That is just ridiculous. I thought this review was about architechture and what it can perform and not about which compiler we use and if it is true that optimizations is turned off in then Intel compiler if it is an AMD cpu then the score is worthless and the comparison is severly biased.

quote:Your LINPACK score just seems obscure. Somewhat Intel friendly compiler? LOL. If the compiler is so great why is the gcc score I read on another review 30% higher with the Barcelona(with a 1.9 GHz CPU)? That is just ridiculous. I thought this review was about architechture and what it can perform and not about which compiler we use and if it is true that optimizations is turned off in then Intel compiler if it is an AMD cpu then the score is worthless and the comparison is severly biased.

Which review? Did they fully disclose the compiler settings?

If the Intel compiler did fool us and turned off optimisations, we will update the numbers. Reply